


as if it's your last

by soulofme



Category: Easy Love - Fandom
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Light Angst, M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-08
Updated: 2018-02-08
Packaged: 2019-03-15 12:36:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13613514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soulofme/pseuds/soulofme
Summary: "What if we don't get tomorrow?"





	as if it's your last

Nick rolls his pants up to his knees and steps into the creek without a second thought, his feet planted firmly on the round, wet rocks. He holds his arms out to catch the sun in his upturned palms, leaning his face into the warmth that surrounds them.

I find myself frozen on the bank, staring at the moist soil caked thickly between my toes. I can hear voices in the distance, faint and almost unrecognizable, and I imagine the tear-streaked faces of our classmates as they take in their surroundings. June 12, the date we all graduated from high school.

No. Not all of us.

“Ace?”

Nick is turned toward me, an expectant look on his face. I scramble for a response, something along the lines of _What?_ or _Yeah_? _,_ but nothing leaves my lips. I furrow my eyebrows and sort through the jumbled mess that is my own brain, trying and failing to think of something, anything to say.

Nick doesn’t move from his spot, but he turns to face me fully. Worry creases his brow and makes itself home in his dark, knowing eyes. I feel sick to my stomach almost instantly, the past few months of pity filling my gut and clawing its way up my throat.

“Hey.”

“What?” I finally manage. I can’t even feel proud of myself for managing such a response. I just feel lightheaded.

I crouch down and let my head hang heavy between my shoulders. Nick walks towards me carefully, as if I’m a wild animal ready to pounce. I guess it’s a fair assumption, taking into account my past few months of reckless and unpredictable behavior.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Nick says. He always does. “But you deserve this. We all deserve this.”

His words feel like a knife, a knife that has been thrust into my defenses and twisted cruelly. I let myself run them over in my head, over and over until they feel like they’re my thoughts, words that I had strung together all by myself.

“He should have been here,” I say. “Demian should have been here.”

It’s the first time any of us have said his name, the first time I’ve given the thought of him a life outside of my own head. Nick doesn’t recoil or flinch, not like I would have. He sits down on the wet earth beside me, water soaking the seat of his expensive slacks, once crisp and pristine, now wrinkled and soiled. I grind my teeth together, hard enough that it sends pinpricks of pain along my jaw.

“You’re right,” Nick says. I feel sick. “You’re goddamn _right_.”

“You remember that pact?” I say. “The one we made as kids.”

“Sure,” Nick says, easy and gentle, like it’s exactly what he’d expected me to say. I try not to think about that, about us being close enough for him to know every single detail about me.

“Same school, same job, same life,” I say, listing them off on my fingers.

“Best friends until we die,” Nick finishes, and the words taste so damn bitter when I swallow them down.

“You and I moved,” I say, holding up a finger on my opposite hand. “None of us have the same interests. And Demian is…”

It feels too soft to say gone, too hard to say dead, and yet they mean the same thing. Demian’s dead, gone because he decided life wasn’t worth living anymore. There’s no way to sugar-coat the truth, to make it an easier pill to swallow, and yet I keep valiantly trying to make this make _sense_.

Nick looks down at the ground then. I stare at the fabric bunched around his knees so that I don’t have to look at his face.

“I’m sorry.”

“You didn’t kill him.”

“Neither did you.”

No one knows why Demian did it. Not me, not Nick, not Demian’s family and other friends. All any of us know is that he’s up there, we’re down here, and nobody knows what to think or feel.

I suck in a heavy breath and hold it, focusing on the pressure that builds on my chest. It feels like a hand, heavy and firm, and I close my eyes and lose myself in it. I only stop when Nick grabs my shoulder, forcing my body to turn towards him. I fall flat on my ass, my legs too weak to support my weight, and I let him hold up my weight for once.

“Stop blaming yourself,” he says. It sounds easy in theory, and I long to tell him that I’ve already tried. But that’s not the truth, and Nick has always hated liars.

“Who do I blame, then?” I ask instead. “Demian?”

Nick presses his lips into a firm line. I rake my fingers through my hair, feeling how the pomade I had slicked into settles into the webbing between my fingers, and rest my face in my hands.

“I’m sorry,” Nick says again, and I find myself getting irritated at how the words slow so easily off of his tongue.

“What if we don’t get tomorrow?” I ask. Nick stiffens beside me, but I continue on. “What if today is all we have?”

He doesn’t say anything, not at first. I listen to him breathing and feel the solid weight of him by my side. It feels like time has been frozen, like the world has narrowed down to just the two of us. My nerves are a mess, a live wire that’s been frayed, and I wonder how much of me Nick can see right now. We’re close enough that we’re breathing the same air, mere inches apart, and the space between us feels like it’s charged with electricity.

“Then,” he says, shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip with me, “we make the most of what we _do_ have.”

It sounds like something Demian would say, something optimistic and bright that would leave us all with a feeling of hope. It feels like a promise, like something I want to hold close and protect, and suddenly it’s as if I can breathe again.

“Okay,” I say, my voice hardly above a whisper, and I turn my head towards Nick.

He stares at me with an unreadable expression for a few moments before he nods. I don’t need him to say anything else.

Everything I need to hear has already been said.


End file.
